Falcon Heavy and Starman [video] | Hacker News Reader

Falcon Heavy and Starman [video]

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99 pointsSignez23 comments

Wow. Amazing video to sum up a breathtaking event.

I really liked this bit from Elon's tweet:

"Life cannot just be about solving one sad problem after another. There need to be things that inspire you, that make you glad to wake up in the morning and be part of humanity. That is why we did it. We did for you."

AFAIK the first view of the center core splashdown at 1:13 - https://youtu.be/A0FZIwabctw?t=1m10s

Kudos to SpaceX for including that footage. Could have easily left it out, as I suppose that portion of the whole thing was a very costly failure. But there was so much win in the rest of the whole deal that everybody I've talked to about it didn't even know part of the rocket was lost.

Would've been nice if they hadn't lied about it during the livestream though, but i guess "everybody didn't even know" was exactly the point of why they did that. Big departure from their earlier modus operandi as well. Wonder if they'll also upload a full video of that crash like with their earlier crashes or whether they've changed that behavior too.

SpaceX has often not released droneship crash footage until quite a while later. The recent "How not to land an orbital rocket" crash compilation contained a lot of footage SpaceX had not released before. So there's nothing new about this choice of coverage.

1. It is quite a while later.

2. Them lying live on stream with the evidence of the lie clearly visible is new.

1. The footage released in the "How not to land an Orbital Rocket" includes previously unseen footage from more than a year before the release of the video. FH's launch was last month.

2. Uh, no. You don't know what they knew, you're guessing, and then calling them liars. I think it's dodgy, but I know I don't know enough to call anyone a liar.

Oooh, so you're simply unaware and your bias prompts you to assume i'm making shit up. Here, let me fix that.

Watch exactly one minute after this timestamp, pay attention to the screen at the right edge of the video, in the middle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c&t=30m33s

Drone ship feed static for a while, then smoke on deck clears, no core visible, deck empty. Both go "oh." and after a pause: "we're waiting to hear what happens. [...] we'll let you know as soon as we find out" and "we'll [...] know [...] whether it's standing".

It is clear during all of this that they're looking at the same video feed as is in the background, because the timing of their reactions is exactly in synch.

They saw it didn't land, they found out immediately and didn't let "us" know. Instead they claimed it might be possible it is standing despite seeing the empty deck.

PS: You could've asked instead of engaging in cheer pressure.

This was a completely new failure mode for ASDS landings.

Often we see blue sky, then the video feed freezes (“satellite antenna gets shaken too much” is the official reason) then the feed resumes with a booster nonchalantly appearing through the smoke. Or we get a cut, then nothing, then a reveal days or years later about what really happened. Booster missed barge, tried to compensate by tilting st extreme angle, collides with barge. Booster lands, but has too much rotstional momentum, crushes landing leg, tips over a explodes. Booster lands, landing leg fails to lock, booster tips over and explodes. Booster almost lands, runs out of fuel a few metres above the deck, collapses the landing gear and explodes.

Looking through the smoke this time, anyone watching that feed for the first time would have been waiting for either a standing booster or a pile of debris. But we saw neither.

They would then have been advised to cut the commentary and speculation to return to the rest of the mission.

So yes, they were “lying” in that they wanted to talk about what they saw (or didn’t see) but kept talking about the rest of the mission in progress.

I can understand that you want to feel outrage, but in this instance I don’t think there’s any justification at all.

I appreciate you're trying to be logical about this, but it doesn't make sense to me.

If you accept that they saw the same feed as was behind them; if you accept that they knew the connection cutting was the booster coming down; then i see no reason to say "[we'll find out] whether it's standing" AFTER the smoke clears, except to misdirect the stream audience.

Do you have any concrete alternative explanation for that?

I already watched that video last month, and it looked to me like the scene froze as it often does, at that exact point, right before the final part of a landing. Now that I've seen the super-slow-mo version, I can see that I jumped to the wrong conclusion. However, again, I have no idea what the hosts were thinking, and your "liar" theory involves reading their minds.

Or, you know, a bare modicum of common sense.

This is excessively hostile and conspiratorial IMHO. The folks on camera are completely at the mercy of those feeding information to them, and it seems unlikely that there was some master plan to suppress that information or they would have cut the feed completely.

It wasn’t costly. They weren’t going to reuse that core anyway. They’re just starting to roll out their “block 5” cores designed for long-term reusabity, and they won’t fly the older ones much longer. Landing it was just practice for the future.

Landing it is an opportunity to inspect a flown center core for the first time. Even though future center cores are different, there was still a lot that could have been learned.

And at 14s a view of the miniature replica of the car and its occupant. Great video and also a deserving homage to David Bowie.

Good catch. First time I see it as well.

It really weirds me out how songs like this are used in ways that imply an overall meaning so at odds with the apparent intended meaning.

This seems right up there with politicians' love of Springsteen's "Born in the USA".

“Made on Earth by humans.”

Love that. Says so much to me.

What does this mystery circuit board do? Does someone know?

It’s the fuse board from the Roadster’s Power Electronics Module. Photo here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/64909936@N07/24525084280

Searching for that phrase, it seems that Tesla likes to put it on a bunch of their stuff.

Put another junk in the space!

Damn good marketing

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